October 28, 2024

Growing Up in the Fallout of the Utopian Dream

1 hour 3 minutes

In the turbulent late 1970s, six-year-old Susanna Crossman moved with her mother and siblings from a suburban terrace to a crumbling mansion deep in the English countryside.

They would share their new home with over fifty other residents - idealists from all over the world - armed with worn paperbacks on ecology, Marx and radical feminism and drawn together by utopian dreams of remaking the world.

They did not leave for fifteen years.

This was not a hippie commune or a new age retreat but a community run on radical socialist Marxist principles. Yet, however noble the intentions of the adults, was this suitable place - a suitable home - for a child to grow up?

Susanna wrote a book to try to answer that question and came to the Bureau to tell us all about it - and about the pleasures and perils of growing up in the fallout of the Utopian Dream.

Growing Up in the Fallout of the Utopian Dream

1 hour 3 minutes

In the turbulent late 1970s, six-year-old Susanna Crossman moved with her mother and siblings from a suburban terrace to a crumbling mansion deep in the English countryside.

They did not leave for fifteen years.

Susanna wrote a book to try to answer that question and came to the Bureau to tell us all about it - and about the pleasures and perils of growing up in the fallout of the Utopian Dream.